Ask any doctor what women can do to prevent breast
cancer, and the response will probably be to get an annual mammogram after
age 50, or perhaps after age 40. Mammograms certainly are important. But
they do not prevent cancer. They find cancer. Biopsy, surgery, or
chemotherapy then follow.

What is largely unknown to the American public—and sadly
underemphasized in medical schools—is that breast cancer is often a
preventable illness. When I was a medical student, I was not taught that
breast cancer had any relationship to dietary factors. At that time,
breast cancer attacked 1 in every 11 women. When I was a resident in the
early 1980s, most doctors remained ignorant of any risk factors that could
be controlled, and the rate went up to one in ten. The failure to prevent
cancer has exacted an increasing toll; today, the disease attacks one
woman in eight.

It is not that scientists do not have the information.
As long ago as 1982, the National Research Council published a report
called Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer,1 showing the
mountain of evidence already available linking specific dietary factors to
cancer of the breast and other organs. But brochures with watered-down
recommendations have sat collecting dust at cancer research centers. There
was never an organized effort to give women the information they need to
make decisions about cancer prevention.

The dietary factors emerged in comparisons of different
countries. In Japan, for example, breast cancer is rare. But Japanese
women who move to the United States soon have the same risk of cancer as
American women—at least 400 percent higher than in Japan. The differences
in cancer risk between the U.S. and Japan are not due to genetics. Nor is
it something in the air or water. The critical factor is the amount of
fat, particularly animal fat, in the diet.2,3 In Japan, only
about 15 percent of the calories in the diet come from fat. In the U.S.,
the fat content of the diet has been more than two times higher, around 35
percent. The more fat women consume, the greater their cancer risk.
Similar findings have been made within other countries.

When the link between fat and cancer was found,
researchers did not have to look far for an explanation. Several
possibilities presented themselves. First of all, it is known that many
breast tumors are "fueled" by estrogens, the female sex hormones for both
women and men. But the more estrogen there is, the greater the driving
force behind some kinds of breast cancer. The principal estrogen is
estradiol, and the amount of estradiol produced by the body is linked to
the amount of fat in the diet. On high-fat diets, estradiol production
increases. On low-fat diets, it decreases.4-6 When women first
adopt low-fat diets, their estradiol levels drop noticeably in a very
short time. Vegans (people who consume no animal products) have
significantly lower estrogen levels than non-vegetarians, perhaps because
of the lower fat content of the vegan diet.

In addition, estradiol is carried in the blood on
special carrier molecules. On high-fat diets, more estradiol breaks free
from its carrier molecules and becomes biologically active, like soldiers
jumping off a jeep and starting their attack. So high-fat diets may
promote cancer by increasing the amount in addition to promoting the
biological activity of estradiol in the body.

Another problem with high-fat diets is that the meat,
poultry, fish, and dairy products that usually make up such diets are
devoid of fiber. Fiber is the part of plant foods that resists digestion
in the intestinal tract. Evidence suggests that fiber helps reduce
estrogen levels by trapping it in the digestive tract. In addition,
soybeans, which are a mainstay of Asian diets, contain phytoestrogens,
which are very weak estrogens which can compete with and blunt the effect
of normal estrogens. In the process, soybean products have been shown to
reduce cancer risk.

So high-fat diets increase estrogen production,
apparently increasing cancer risk. Low-fat, high-fiber diets reduce
estrogens to a more biologically normal level. Since meat, poultry, fish,
and dairy products contain no fiber at all, they increase the fat content
and reduce the fiber content of the diet by displacing plant foods.

Since most Americans are on high-fat diets, one might
ask if the resultant elevation of estrogen has other effects. The answer
is almost certainly yes. During my medical education, I worked for a time
at an inner-city clinic in Washington, D.C. There, girls of 12 and 13
would come in asking for birth control pills. Many had already had their
first child and did not want to become pregnant again. I wondered why
nature designed the human body to become sexually mature at an age when
girls are not old enough to care for a child or even to sustain a
long-term relationship. It appears that nature is not to blame. In fact,
evidence suggests that the boy is designed to reach puberty a bit later.

According to the World Health Organization, the average
age of puberty in girls in western countries in 1840 was about 17 years of
age. Today we take it as a matter of course that girls will reach puberty
at 11, 12, or 13. One-hundred-fifty years ago, high-fat diets were limited
to a small, wealthy portion of the population.7 Today, high-fat
diets have spread to the entire population, and puberty has occurred
earlier and earlier, possibly due to the estrogen increase caused by
high-fat diets. Early puberty has been associated with increased risk of
breast cancer. A comparison of different countries lends further support
to this theory. In China, low-fat diets are still the rule. There, the age
of puberty ranges between 15 and 19. Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell
University has studied the Chinese diet, which is centered on rice and
vegetables, with little meat and no dairy products. The apparent effect is
not just a higher age of puberty, but also phenomenally low rates of heart
disease, obesity, and cancer.

High-fat diets may also encourage the absorption of
carcinogens into the body. Researchers have observed, for example, that
when the carcinogens in cigarette smoke are absorbed through the lung
tissue, they tend to travel along with fats in the blood. It may be that
on a low-fat diet, the body is less able to absorb and transport
carcinogens.

Evidence suggests that other factors also play important
roles. The mineral selenium, found in grains, helps prevent cancer, as
does physical exercise and avoiding alcohol.

We can dramatically reduce the toll, not only of breast
cancer, but of other cancers as well. As everyone now knows, a low-fat,
high-fiber, plant-based diet helps protect against colon cancer.

And there is more: we now have clues to preventing
cancer of the ovary. A complex and fascinating study by Dr. Daniel Cramer
of Harvard University elucidated the relationship between cancer and diet.
Dr. Cramer studied hundreds of women with ovarian cancer, and had them
record in detail what they normally ate. He compared them to a group of
women who were similar in age and other demographic variables but did not
develop cancer. There was one thing that the women with cancer had eaten
much more frequently than women without cancer: dairy products, especially
the supposedly "healthy" products, such as yogurt.

The culprit may be a normal breakdown product of the
milk sugar lactose. Lactose is broken down in the body to another sugar
called galactose. In turn, galactose is broken down further by enzymes in
the body. According to Dr. Cramer,8 when dairy product
consumption exceeds the enzymes' capacity to break down galactose, there
is a build-up of galactose in the blood, which may damage a woman's
ovaries. Some women have particularly low levels of these enzymes, and
when they consume dairy products on a regular basis, their risk of ovarian
cancer can be triple that of other women. The problem is the milk sugar,
not the milk fat, so it is not solved by using non-fat products. In fact,
yogurt and cottage cheese seem to be of most concern because the bacteria
used in their production increase the production of galactose from
lactose.

There is a great deal of evidence that dietary factors
can help prevent cancer. But what about improving survival for those who
have cancer? The evidence is not all in, but there is reason to believe
that foods can have an important effect here, too. The immune system is
our line of defense against both initial cancers and the spread of cancer.
Substantial evidence shows that certain foods can bolster immune function,
while others impair it. For example, natural killer cells are specialized
white blood cells that seek out and destroy cancer cells. A recent German
study showed that vegetarians have more than twice the natural killer cell
activity of non-vegetarians.9 It is not yet known whether the
immune strength of vegetarians comes from their having double the number
of natural killer cells or from each cell having double the killing power.
Whichever it is, vegetarians have a defense against cancer cells that is
far beyond that of their meat-eating fellows. The immune strength of a
vegetarian diet probably comes from its low fat content and from
vitamin-rich vegetables and fruits.

Low-fat diets strengthen the immune defenses against
cancer cells. Researchers in New York tested the effect of low-fat diets
on immunity.10 They put healthy volunteers on a diet which cut
the fat content to 20 percent. Three months later, the researchers took
blood samples from the volunteers and examined their natural killer cells.
As in the German study, the natural killer cell activity was greatly
increased, although not as much as on the vegetarian diet used by the
German researchers. It appears that all fats and oils—animal or
vegetable—can impair the immune system.11,12 Even fish oils
interfere with natural killer cells.13,14

Certain vitamins can be immune boosters. Beta-carotene
is naturally found in yellow and dark green vegetables. Several research
studies at the National Cancer Institute have shown that those who consume
generous amounts of beta-carotene-rich vegetables cut their cancer risk
substantially. Beta-carotene's power comes partly from its ability to
neutralize free radicals, molecules which tend to form in the body and
which can attack the cells and cause cancer. Vitamins C and E also have
some of this ability. But beta-carotene also increases the number of
natural killer cells and increases the number of another kind of white
blood cell, called the T-helper cell, which helps direct the immune
response.15 The minerals selenium, zinc, and iron are also
important to immune function, although for zinc and iron, both too much
and too little can spell problems.

A cancer prevention diet has to be very different from
even the diet recommended by the National Cancer Institute. The NCI still
recommends a 30-percent fat diet, in spite of strong evidence that a
30-percent fat limit is far too high. The Japanese and Chinese do not eat
a 30-percent fat diet. Their diets have half the fat of the
NCI-recommended diet. A study by Dr. Willett and his colleagues at Harvard
showed that a diet drawing 30 percent of its calories from fat had no
measurable effect on cancer incidence.16 A cancer prevention
diet should contain no more than 10 to 15 percent fat and should be
vegetarian.

All together, the new knowledge on prevention is
powerful artillery in the war on cancer. According to the National Cancer
Institute, as much as 80 percent of cancers can potentially be stopped
before they ever start. Tobacco amounts for 30 percent of cancer cases.
Dietary factors account for even more, from 35 to 50 percent. As the
consumption of meat, dairy products, and fried foods has become a daily
routine, the female body has been assaulted by altered hormonal function,
an unnatural age of puberty, and a much greater risk of cancer. By
eliminating unhealthful dietary factors and encouraging the diets that
diminish risk, we can hope to turn the tide on this epidemic.

The Meat Free Zone (MFZ) campaign is intended to make the MeatFreeZone logo as
recognizable a symbol as the "Smoke Free Zone". The idea was originally
conceived when The WARM Store in Woodstock, NY, was in operation throughout the
'90's (Woodstock Animal Rights Movement). The store was truly a meat free zone
as it was the first cruelty-free, Vegan, socially conscious animal rights store
in the United States. Now that the Vegan and Vegetarian movements have been
growing so rapidly, more and more people are showing concern about the food in
their diet and their overall health and nutrition. Many people are giving up
eating fish, chicken, beef, pork (pigs ), dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt,
ice cream) and eggs. Headlines of Mad Cow disease, E-coli
and salmonella are in the news with greater frequency. Vegan and vegetarian
recipe cookbooks are standard now in all bookstores and many restaurants have
added Vegan and Vegetarian options to their menus. We hope you will help us with
the Meat Free Zone campaign by putting the signs up in your homes and workplaces
and by spreading them to all the vegetarian and vegan restaurants that you know
and frequent. And someday we will have true "meat free zones" in establishments
that serve meat.
(d-3)